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Show ANCIENT MARVEL OF EGYPT ! 1 Labyrinth Constructed Some 3,500 i Years Aflo Was a Structure of Colossal Size. King Minos, with his labyrinth on the island of Crete, Is generally sup- ! posed to have been the originator of the maze Idea ; but Egypt has a labyrinth, laby-rinth, too, and Egypt maunges to hold the record for antiquity in almost everything, ev-erything, labyrinths Included. This Egyptian labyrinth Is 3.500 years old. It Is merely a chaotic mass of rocks piled up in the desert a few miles out of Medinet. The outlines of j the walls merge dimly here and there I from the ruins, and from these out- i lines, and the carvings on the stones, 1 Egyptologists deduce that the laby- j rlnth was built by a certain King I Labarys, who was more popularly j known as Amenemhat III. The structure was 500 by COO feet. j It contained 3,000 rooms, half above I ground, half below. Remember that ! the largest hotel in our present day j world boasts about that number of rooms on a dozen floors and covers a city square, and some Idea of the size I of the two-story labyrinth can be gained. Nobody has figured out yet why King Amenemhat built this enormous palace pal-ace or tomb. In the lower story, history his-tory says, the sacred crocodiles and kings were buried, while the upper floor was, a few centuries after King Amenemhat's time, used as a seat of government. The labyrinth was a wonderful place, one of the most wonderful in Egypt, if our Ideas of It are correct, and its greatness was Its downfall. The citizens of a near-by town, who worshiped the ichneumon, resented the sacred crocodiles of the labyrinth. And so they made an attack upon one of King Amenemhat's successors and reduced the largest structure in Egypt to a ruin. |